Passing (Or Failing) the June Test

The thing to remember about Eddie Haskell is that he never, ever, not even for a second, fooled June Cleaver. We all knew that; Wally knew it, too.

Which brings us too the latest adventures of Paul Ryan -- and of (some members of) a press corps, Dave Weigel reports, who entirely fail the "June test" and are reporting that Ryan is an uberWonk because he uses...wait for it...PowerPoint. And because he included a few pie charts.

Weigel passes the June test. So does Kevin Drum. Paul Krugman, too. Sort of. Krugman says that Ryan "very clearly doesn’t know what his numbers actually mean," but I don't think we have evidence of that; we know that he's comfortable using phony numbers, but that doesn't mean he doesn't realize they're phony. Eddie surely knows he's putting on an act for Wally's mom, after all; that Eddie grins like an idiot when June is around isn't evidence that Eddie is an idiot.

(I don't remember: did we ever see Eddie's act fool anyone? Teachers, maybe? I'm certainly not going to be upset at having a reason to go back and re-watch a few episodes...).

Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore -- who certainly passes the June test -- raises the point that with Ryan forced to keep his "Eddie" mask on for the duration of the campaign, he risks harming his reputation with those who like the other Eddie, the one who comes out when the grownups aren't around (the one, that is, who doesn't hesitate to play along with the crudest ACA myths). While that's possible, my suspicion is that the real threat to Ryan's future isn't that he has to play along with Mitt Romney during the campaign. Kilgore uses the example of Jack Kemp to argue that Ryan could be hurt, but I suspect that Kemp's problem may have been more that his interests really did diverge from mainstream conservatives. Meanwhile, the examples of Richard Nixon in the 1950s and, more recently, Dan Quayle would seem to point the other way; while Quayle never recovered from national ridicule, conservatives never really help George H.W. Bush's various sellouts against him.

The real danger to Ryan is if his constituency outside of the party, the non-partisan budget hawks and the press, wise up. In other words, it's not his mask that he's wearing for this campaign, but his long-term Eddie Haskell act that people outside the GOP have bought that's at risk with his high-profile national campaign.

Well, that and one other thing: Ryan also convinced the Wally Cleavers in the House Republican Conference to vote for all sorts of unpopular things, including those Medicare cuts they ran against in 2010, and which they're presumably getting hit for on the campaign trail now. I mean, Wally never really liked Eddie all that much, but Eddie never gets him into real trouble, does he? If the elections wind up going worse for House Republicans than they expect, and the budget gets some of their blame, you do have to wonder whether they'll trust their Eddie next time he comes up with some cool idea for them.